Tim Walz’s Incomplete Pass

Tim Walz’s speech last night was fine. But as I watched I noticed that the crowd inside the United Center was reacting much more strongly to what the Coach had to say than I was sitting at home. For me there was something missing.

I couldn’t quite put my finger on it until I read this this morning from center-right New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, who quoted from Bill Clinton’s speech. “As someone who spends a lot of time in small towns in rural areas in New York and Arkansas and other places,” Clinton said, “I urge you to talk to all of your neighbors, to meet people where they are. I urge you not to demean them.”

Stephens then went on to write: “That’s good advice in any election cycle, but perhaps never more so than in this one. Democrats want Americans to believe that democracy itself hangs in the balance in this election. Perhaps it does, but undecided voters who recall similar dire warnings from 2016 will most likely be unimpressed. What they’ll be asking instead is how a Harris presidency will be better than the Biden one with which they weren’t altogether happy.”

As has so often been the case for the last three decades, Bill Clinton got it right. And I suppose that’s the tone and the message that I wanted to hear from Walz. Something along the lines of, ‘I know Trump voters. I’ve lived among them. I’ve taught their kids. Heck, some of my former students are Trump voters. These are not bad people. They’ve got real concerns that for too long our party has dismissed or ignored or condescended to. But something in American life is failing them so badly that they’ll even vote for a man like Donald Trump just to change it. We don’t need to explain to them just how awful that man is. They know. And yet they vote for him precisely because he represents the antithesis of some aspects of the Democratic Party. So, in justifiably pointing to all that’s wrong with Trump, let’s not assume that his voters are like him.’

I wish he had said something like that. I think this was his great opportunity to level with his own party. Instead, it seemed like he was trying to take a liberal agenda and make a case that it was actually in the mainstream of America. On that score, I actually think he did fine. Most Americans support reproductive rights, free school lunches and sensible limits on guns. A lot of Trump and swing voters would agree that government should “mind its own damn business!”

And, of course, his job as Kamala Harris’ running mate is not to say what he wants, but to say what her campaign believes will help her. He didn’t hurt her and he probably helped some. It wasn’t a bad speech. But it could have been so much better.